HAMPTON ROADS, Va. - (October 6, 2006) - Tidewater Community College announced today its intention to award the contract for managing its bookstore to Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, Inc. Under the terms of the contract, Barnes & Noble will provide bookstore services for all four TCC campuses and the community with the first stores scheduled to open in the college’s Spring semester.

As part of this unique agreement, Barnes & Noble will operate the main TCC Bookstore at MacArthur Center in downtown Norfolk and a permanent satellite bookstore at the college’s Virginia Beach Campus in the Princess Anne Commons section of the city—that campus serves more than 20,000 students annually. In addition, during peak book-selling periods in the academic year, temporary, on-campus distribution centers will operate on the college’s other two campuses in Chesapeake and Portsmouth. And kiosks with academic supplies and incidentals will operate throughout the year at those two campuses.

“This strategic partnership with Barnes & Noble will allow us to serve our students better by leveraging the size of the college to achieve a major bookstore operation,” TCC President Deborah DiCroce says. “Of course, the presence of a Barnes & Noble store in MacArthur Center will be a significant addition to the Downtown scene—one that will benefit our students as well as those who work in the city center and the increasing number of residents there.”

The MacArthur Center bookstore will be a brand new, 28,000 square-foot, two-story “academic superstore” featuring products to serve the needs of TCC students and faculty by providing textbooks, reference materials, TCC emblematic gifts and clothing products. The bookstore will also feel very much like a traditional Barnes & Noble store with newspapers, general interest books/periodicals, titles of local interest to the public, a children’s department, and a full-service Starbuck’s Café. When it opens in Summer 2007, the MacArthur Center TCC Bookstore’s hours of operation will be Monday through Saturday 8 am to 10 pm and Sunday 11 am to 6 pm.

For students who prefer shopping online, Barnes & Noble will offer the option of ordering textbooks directly from the bookstore’s website at
http://www.tcc.bncollege.com. Once placed, online book orders can be delivered or picked-up at one of the two bookstores or a campus distribution center. Faculty members can also utilize Barnes & Noble's innovative Faculty Center Network (FCN). The FCN is an online resource containing a robust bibliographic database of book summaries, tables of contents, author biographies, book rankings, usage information, and sample chapters for nearly 400,000 textbook titles.

“We are very proud to have been selected by TCC and look forward to working with Tidewater Community College to create an innovative system of stores that provides the entire TCC community and the City of Norfolk with a first-rate bookstore experience,” says Max Roberts, President of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, Inc.

Tidewater Community College
is the second largest of the 23 community colleges in the Commonwealth
of Virginia, enrolling more than 37,000 students annually. The 37th
largest in the nation’s 1,600 community-college network, TCC
ranks among the 50 fastest-growing large community colleges. Founded
in 1968 as a part of the Virginia Community College System, the
college serves the South Hampton Roads region with campuses in Chesapeake,
Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach as well as the TCC Jeanne
and George Roper Performing Arts Center in the theater district
in downtown Norfolk, the Visual Arts Center in Olde Towne Portsmouth
and a regional Advanced Technology Center in Virginia Beach. Forty-four
percent of the region’s residents attending a college or university
in Virginia last fall were enrolled at TCC. For more information,
visit www.tcc.edu